7 ms·

Billionaires to the Barricades

23 points by msh 11y ago

a3n 11y ago
>Given the political groundswell for decreasing wealth disparity, Mr. West added, “There’s a realization among the billionaire class that it’s actually in their own self-interest to at least spread some of the wealth around.” Especially since all of their wealth comes from having figured out how to keep a larger portion of the product of labor than labor itself.
- larrys 11y ago
  "to at least spread some of the wealth around" In other words "spread the cheer around". The mythical mafia does this in popular culture as well by apparently buying Turkeys at Christmas time (for example) and helping people out in small ways and building trust. That trust allows them (in theory) to get away with the crimes that they commit (among other reasons). I say "mythical" because this is a popular cultural observation of mine, not some fact backed up by research. But I have found it to be true that people tend to look the other way if their palms are getting greased. In case it's not entirely obvious it is also one of the reasons (along with tax benefits) that the rich give to charity causes. The good will gets those in power to look the other way.
- CuriousSkeptic 11y ago
  Figured out might be giving to much credit. The system really is in their favor and the more you have, the easier it gets. It's almost as if capital acts like gravity in our current setup. Maybe that's a good thing, and it's only the governance model that is at fault (private ownership). Or perhaps we should look closer at the externalities involved. Why is it that you can own a limited resource, like land, and profit from it. Shouldn't the exclusive control over a limited resource come with a cost?
  - obrero 11y ago
    > a limited resource, like land, and profit from it. Shouldn't the exclusive control over a limited resource Capital makes money by unpaid labor. A woodshop is inherited by an heir. The carpenter comes in and creates furniture - let us say tables. The material for the table - wood, screws, varnish etc. cost $80. This would also include other costs - if a saw blade costs $100 but is good for 100 tables, then that 1/100 of a sawblade ($1) is included in the $80. The table sells for $100 in a store attached to the woodshop. So all totalled inputs are $80, and the labor from the carpenter produces $20 of wealth per table. The carpenter produces two tables an hour, and works for eight hours a day. So the carpenter creates $320 worth of value a day. The carpenter keeps all the wealth he creates for the first six hours a day - his daily take home pay is $240. However, the carpenter is not paid for his labor for the last two hours a day. He is working for free, with all wealth generated going to the heir. This is surplus value he is generating, which is expropriated by the heir. This is where the profit comes from. All modern rentier wealth is generated through these means. In the case of farmland, it is similar to the woodshop and carpenters, except we have workers, mostly of Mexican descent, working unpaid at the end of the day picking fruit in the Central Valley for those who took control of the land after Commodore John Sloat sailed his warships into Monterey Bay in the 1840s. If the farmowner rents houses to the braceros, it is the same process, just one but removed. The landlord is not working for rent, the person doing the work to create the wealth is still the renter, it is just one level of abstraction. Usury is similar - moneylenders don't work for the wealth - they collect interest from those who do. Ultimately the value of all commodities derive from the work needed to create it. It doesn't take a lot of effort to collect and commoditize rainwater, so water is cheap. To find and mine gold takes more effort, so it is more expensive. The social relationship of expropriation of unpaid time is what is important. It is all social relationships. There are no signs pointing down from the heavens saying who owns what. If it did, the farmland taken in California at gunpoint would belong to the Indians and Mexicans who lived there, not the heirs of that thest 175 years ago. With the profits derived from the labor of fruit-pickers, the theft continues to this day. As it does in the air-conditioned offices of Kifer Road and Market Street.
- WalterBright 11y ago
  How do you explain Steve Jobs, who stepped into the nearly bankrupt Apple and transformed it into the largest company in the world?
  - a3n 11y ago
    I don't understand the question, relative to my statement.
    - WalterBright 11y ago
      Steve Jobs created enormous wealth, using the same group of people that were working just as hard before, but were headed for bankruptcy. I.e. it's not about how hard or long one works. It's about working effectively.
      - a3n 11y ago
        He didn't make anything. His wealth, and Apple's wealth, would not have happened without the labor of all those people who actually made the products. Scenario A: "I want to make iPhones. All you people at Apple, and all you people at FoxConn, get to work." Result: iPhones and wealth. Scenario B: "I want to make iPhones. I wish I had some laborers." Result: Nothing. Scenario C: "We workers want to make something. Mr Jobs, we hire you as our manager. Get to work, and sell these things." Result: maybe iPhones, maybe what we have today, maybe something else. Ideas and management are great and necessary, but not sufficient and not exclusive.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Can we identify any laborer anywhere whose lot in life was improved by St. Steve's miraculous revenue growth?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
applecore 11y ago
The full video of Rupert's opening keynote at the Luxury Summit [1], informed by Brynjolfsson's recent monograph, The Second Machine Age [2], is epic and well worth a listen. [1]: https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ehome/108160 https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ehome/108160 [2]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp/0393239357 http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp...
lscore720 11y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong: a revolution could not actually happen, right? The militarization of law enforcement and advanced weaponry of our government would prevent the people from rising up. I find this discouraging, because I do see this as a last resort if inequality continues at this rate.
- hga 11y ago
  One could certainly happen in the US, for the people are very well armed and are continuing to arm themselves at a rate I find alarming, even if, or because, I'm one of them. The militarization of law enforcement doesn't mean much, e.g. look at how they completely loose there shit in the face of one disturbed, not very clever or effective assassin like Christopher Dorner [ADDED: there's a lot of cargo culting here; giving 10 police officer M16s/M4s, SAWs and grenades does not magically turn them into an US Army infantry squad]. At the other extreme, we the people can completely swamp them in a matter of hours, but of course motivating us to do that would be quite a trick. "Advanced weaponry" is of no use without the will to use it. As an extreme example, a few nukes could terminate ISIS with extreme prejudice and collateral damage, but I don't know of any serious "hawk" even suggesting [WAS: advocating] their use. I have grave doubts about your closing point, "a last resort if inequality continues at this rate"; is that so bad it's worth killing millions of people to merely attempt to fix it, with many and perhaps the most likely end results further emphasizing it? For that matter, who/what groups are going to start pulling triggers?
  - joshuapants 11y ago
    > "Advanced weaponry" is of no use without the will to use it. As an extreme example, a few nukes could terminate ISIS with extreme prejudice and collateral damage, but I don't know of any serious "hawk" even advocating their use. Very good point. Air support of any kind would be unhelpful in a revolution because the government would, understandably, be reluctant to bomb the hell out of its own population/economic centers.
  - scottwhudson 11y ago
    I don't understand why the pro-gun community doesn't take a stronger stance against mass surveillance, "swamping" a group of law enforcement requires communication that can't be deciphered, and the general public has little interest in that. History tells us that communication wins wars (think cracking the enigma machine), but we're losing the ability to communicate privately at an alarming rate. How do you plan to "swarm" when the safest method of communication is the carrier pigeon?
angersock 11y ago
You can buy a hell of a lot of people for less than a billion dollars, either directly or indirectly via a chance at making it rich. As Gould said: "I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half." Hell, most of our industry is based, in one way or another, on the slim hope that out of all of the other companies destroying user privacy and selling data that our company will be the one the market deems worthy of lots of funding and investment.
Animats 11y ago
“That’s the real danger,” Mr. Cohan said. “This little thing called the French Revolution.” Occupy Wall Street should have set up a guillotine. Just to send that message.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  The government was prepared to assassinate leaders, in case they needed a response.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    If they had been serious rather than play-acting, the leaders would have jumped at the chance to die for the "crime" of speaking truth to power. Unless you're talking about secret assassinations carried out by traffic accident or similarly deniable means, months after the fact to prevent a PR problem, out of spite rather than to silence. I'm not sure what could be done about that sort of thing.
    - wavefunction 11y ago
      rm_-rf_slash is referring to plans by the FBI to shoot Occupy protestors "if the need arose" that were leaked after the main occupations were broken up. The NYPD for example set up an elaborate surveillance center and identified "leaders" in the movement for such a scenario. Other police units around the country did the same or similar.
Chevalier 11y ago
>And yet the extremely wealthy do face an abiding risk from festering inequity: The have-nots might finally lose patience and turn upon the haves. “That’s the real danger,” Mr. Cohan said. “This little thing called the French Revolution.” Yeah... I keep hearing this threat from people who really ought to know better. Inequality is a major talking point from the left, but it reflects complete ignorance of how the world works. The French Revolution is memorable precisely because it's so incredibly unusual. Look at Mexico, India, China... almost anywhere in the world aside from Europe and North America. There is virtually no society on the planet that doesn't concentrate wealth and power among the elite one percent, gated off from the lower classes. I'm not even speaking historically -- show me a modern country on any other continent that even remotely approaches a middle class. Also, re-distributing wealth doesn't necessarily solve the cultural problems that create inequality. Egypt massively subsidized food... and Egyptians promptly had massive numbers of children that overwhelmed even the ridiculously cheap food prices. Just this week, Afghanis threw acid in the faces of schoolgirls trying to get an education. The Saudis cling to power through massive welfare programs to pacify their increasingly fundamentalist populace. Even here in the US, cultures that discourage education and responsibility aren't suddenly going to churn out engineers and doctors if billionaires give away their wealth. The US will just continue down the well-trodden path that the rest of the world has already blazed, where tiny pockets of wealthy elites try to shelter themselves from the increasingly lawless masses. A revolution requires organization and discipline, which is absurd to expect even before you consider the unbeatable modern surveillance of all communications and movements in developed countries. The only threat that masses pose is lawless violence, much like what we saw in the Arab Spring -- but that's not really a problem when you can concentrate the rabble outside of elite pockets. Particularly when the rabble lack a unifying religious fervor, like what you see in the coalescing identity of fundamentalist Islam across MENA and Europe. So please stop making vague threats about the French Revolution, people. The Second Amendment is not going to help rednecks water the tree of liberty. The people are not going to surge against their capitalist oppressors as a tide of justice or whatever. At worst, less developed countries will turn into Libya... but the more likely result is India, where elites gate off the masses and let them cultivate self-destructive cultures.
- angrybits 11y ago
wavefunction 11y ago
It seems in some ways that the solutions proposed by these anxious wealthy are limited or perhaps too simplistic. While I applaud their indulgence in supporting a $15 minimum wage, that doesn't mean much if commodity prices grow to erase those gains. It also puts further pressure on the remaining members of the "middle class" as they are the primary consumers of minimum-wage based services and will also be the ones to support the higher wages as costs are passed along to consumers. For decades our relatively equitable societies (minus racial inequalities and other gradually ebbing social issues) have been dismantled by these folks in the upper echelons of wealth and their willing conspirators in the upper-middle class and middle class in order to arrive at the situation we find ourselves in today. They have promoted favorable propaganda through their media organs that has poisoned the minds of the laboring classes towards collaboration, towards entrepreneurialism, and self-agency. They have defunded and neutered social institutions that worked contrary to their goals, even if innocuously like the attempts to destroy quality public education and labor protections. They have introduced a culture of consumption in place of production and individual industry to better capture a greater share of the productive gains furnished by technological and social advances. They have turned whole sectors of life into cut-throat for-profit industries such as health care and education. And the worst part is that they have been incredibly effective in convincing the average person that they have a better deal with a 1 in a million chance of striking it rich through individual luck than a more pragmatic chance at general comfort through social collaboration with their fellow humans. Their propaganda has succeeded wildly in programming many people to distrust government or cooperation in favor of a nihilistic anti-humanist lifestyle of consumer consumption simply because it is more conducive to social control and easing their ability to maintain their positions in society. How then do they propose to put this genie back in the bottle, having now let it loose these past several decades?
- hackuser 11y ago
  > the worst part is that they have been incredibly effective in convincing the average person Agreed. Remember 'Trickle Down Economics', over 30 years ago? If I understand correctly, the idea was to cut taxes for the wealthy, and their resulting increased investment would cause the economic benefits to 'trickle down' to everyone else. The surprising results are that when you cut taxes for high earners ... they become wealthier. Wages for everyone else have been flat since then.
hackuser 11y ago
Two concerns with how the socially concious wealthy might respond: 1) There's a flavor of the paranoid stories that seem prominent in that community (where do they hear this?) and popular on the right wing in general. Remember when Tom Perkins wrote a letter to the editor of the Wall St Journal saying that the wealthy are facing a "Kristallnacht"? [1] The French Revolution comparison and others like it reflects a similar mass paranoia, which is dangerous. 2) It's essential to maintain democracy, i.e., that each citizen has an equal vote. As taxes and public funding have been driven down, recipients have turned more and more to the wealthy donors, with gives the donors the only vote. And as the wealthy few provide more of the funding, they have more arguments to drive taxes down further -- look at what we're doing with our wealth! The problem is, we live in a democracy; we decide by vote how we want our society to change and progress. For a simple example, a new park in NYC is being funded by a wealthy donor; is the land use, design etc. decided democratically by the citizens or by the donor? I read that state universities in CA are forming partnerships with corporations in lieu of lost state funding; can they risk offending those corporations? Finally, the Koch brothers funded some economics institute at a U. in Florida (FL State?) and greatly influence the research, including the selection of faculty (IIRC; my memory of the story is imprecise, but you get the idea). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht

23 points by msh 11y ago

a3n 11y ago

>Given the political groundswell for decreasing wealth disparity, Mr. West added, “There’s a realization among the billionaire class that it’s actually in their own self-interest to at least spread some of the wealth around.” Especially since all of their wealth comes from having figured out how to keep a larger portion of the product of labor than labor itself.

larrys 11y ago
"to at least spread some of the wealth around" In other words "spread the cheer around". The mythical mafia does this in popular culture as well by apparently buying Turkeys at Christmas time (for example) and helping people out in small ways and building trust. That trust allows them (in theory) to get away with the crimes that they commit (among other reasons). I say "mythical" because this is a popular cultural observation of mine, not some fact backed up by research. But I have found it to be true that people tend to look the other way if their palms are getting greased. In case it's not entirely obvious it is also one of the reasons (along with tax benefits) that the rich give to charity causes. The good will gets those in power to look the other way.
CuriousSkeptic 11y ago
Figured out might be giving to much credit. The system really is in their favor and the more you have, the easier it gets. It's almost as if capital acts like gravity in our current setup. Maybe that's a good thing, and it's only the governance model that is at fault (private ownership). Or perhaps we should look closer at the externalities involved. Why is it that you can own a limited resource, like land, and profit from it. Shouldn't the exclusive control over a limited resource come with a cost?
- obrero 11y ago
  > a limited resource, like land, and profit from it. Shouldn't the exclusive control over a limited resource Capital makes money by unpaid labor. A woodshop is inherited by an heir. The carpenter comes in and creates furniture - let us say tables. The material for the table - wood, screws, varnish etc. cost $80. This would also include other costs - if a saw blade costs $100 but is good for 100 tables, then that 1/100 of a sawblade ($1) is included in the $80. The table sells for $100 in a store attached to the woodshop. So all totalled inputs are $80, and the labor from the carpenter produces $20 of wealth per table. The carpenter produces two tables an hour, and works for eight hours a day. So the carpenter creates $320 worth of value a day. The carpenter keeps all the wealth he creates for the first six hours a day - his daily take home pay is $240. However, the carpenter is not paid for his labor for the last two hours a day. He is working for free, with all wealth generated going to the heir. This is surplus value he is generating, which is expropriated by the heir. This is where the profit comes from. All modern rentier wealth is generated through these means. In the case of farmland, it is similar to the woodshop and carpenters, except we have workers, mostly of Mexican descent, working unpaid at the end of the day picking fruit in the Central Valley for those who took control of the land after Commodore John Sloat sailed his warships into Monterey Bay in the 1840s. If the farmowner rents houses to the braceros, it is the same process, just one but removed. The landlord is not working for rent, the person doing the work to create the wealth is still the renter, it is just one level of abstraction. Usury is similar - moneylenders don't work for the wealth - they collect interest from those who do. Ultimately the value of all commodities derive from the work needed to create it. It doesn't take a lot of effort to collect and commoditize rainwater, so water is cheap. To find and mine gold takes more effort, so it is more expensive. The social relationship of expropriation of unpaid time is what is important. It is all social relationships. There are no signs pointing down from the heavens saying who owns what. If it did, the farmland taken in California at gunpoint would belong to the Indians and Mexicans who lived there, not the heirs of that thest 175 years ago. With the profits derived from the labor of fruit-pickers, the theft continues to this day. As it does in the air-conditioned offices of Kifer Road and Market Street.
WalterBright 11y ago
How do you explain Steve Jobs, who stepped into the nearly bankrupt Apple and transformed it into the largest company in the world?
- a3n 11y ago
  I don't understand the question, relative to my statement.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    Steve Jobs created enormous wealth, using the same group of people that were working just as hard before, but were headed for bankruptcy. I.e. it's not about how hard or long one works. It's about working effectively.
    - a3n 11y ago
      He didn't make anything. His wealth, and Apple's wealth, would not have happened without the labor of all those people who actually made the products. Scenario A: "I want to make iPhones. All you people at Apple, and all you people at FoxConn, get to work." Result: iPhones and wealth. Scenario B: "I want to make iPhones. I wish I had some laborers." Result: Nothing. Scenario C: "We workers want to make something. Mr Jobs, we hire you as our manager. Get to work, and sell these things." Result: maybe iPhones, maybe what we have today, maybe something else. Ideas and management are great and necessary, but not sufficient and not exclusive.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Can we identify any laborer anywhere whose lot in life was improved by St. Steve's miraculous revenue growth?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

applecore 11y ago

The full video of Rupert's opening keynote at the Luxury Summit [1], informed by Brynjolfsson's recent monograph, The Second Machine Age [2], is epic and well worth a listen. [1]: https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ehome/108160 https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ehome/108160 [2]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp/0393239357 http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp...

lscore720 11y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong: a revolution could not actually happen, right? The militarization of law enforcement and advanced weaponry of our government would prevent the people from rising up. I find this discouraging, because I do see this as a last resort if inequality continues at this rate.

hga 11y ago
One could certainly happen in the US, for the people are very well armed and are continuing to arm themselves at a rate I find alarming, even if, or because, I'm one of them. The militarization of law enforcement doesn't mean much, e.g. look at how they completely loose there shit in the face of one disturbed, not very clever or effective assassin like Christopher Dorner [ADDED: there's a lot of cargo culting here; giving 10 police officer M16s/M4s, SAWs and grenades does not magically turn them into an US Army infantry squad]. At the other extreme, we the people can completely swamp them in a matter of hours, but of course motivating us to do that would be quite a trick. "Advanced weaponry" is of no use without the will to use it. As an extreme example, a few nukes could terminate ISIS with extreme prejudice and collateral damage, but I don't know of any serious "hawk" even suggesting [WAS: advocating] their use. I have grave doubts about your closing point, "a last resort if inequality continues at this rate"; is that so bad it's worth killing millions of people to merely attempt to fix it, with many and perhaps the most likely end results further emphasizing it? For that matter, who/what groups are going to start pulling triggers?
- joshuapants 11y ago
  > "Advanced weaponry" is of no use without the will to use it. As an extreme example, a few nukes could terminate ISIS with extreme prejudice and collateral damage, but I don't know of any serious "hawk" even advocating their use. Very good point. Air support of any kind would be unhelpful in a revolution because the government would, understandably, be reluctant to bomb the hell out of its own population/economic centers.
- scottwhudson 11y ago
  I don't understand why the pro-gun community doesn't take a stronger stance against mass surveillance, "swamping" a group of law enforcement requires communication that can't be deciphered, and the general public has little interest in that. History tells us that communication wins wars (think cracking the enigma machine), but we're losing the ability to communicate privately at an alarming rate. How do you plan to "swarm" when the safest method of communication is the carrier pigeon?

angersock 11y ago

You can buy a hell of a lot of people for less than a billion dollars, either directly or indirectly via a chance at making it rich. As Gould said: "I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half." Hell, most of our industry is based, in one way or another, on the slim hope that out of all of the other companies destroying user privacy and selling data that our company will be the one the market deems worthy of lots of funding and investment.

Animats 11y ago

“That’s the real danger,” Mr. Cohan said. “This little thing called the French Revolution.” Occupy Wall Street should have set up a guillotine. Just to send that message.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
The government was prepared to assassinate leaders, in case they needed a response.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  If they had been serious rather than play-acting, the leaders would have jumped at the chance to die for the "crime" of speaking truth to power. Unless you're talking about secret assassinations carried out by traffic accident or similarly deniable means, months after the fact to prevent a PR problem, out of spite rather than to silence. I'm not sure what could be done about that sort of thing.
  - wavefunction 11y ago
    rm_-rf_slash is referring to plans by the FBI to shoot Occupy protestors "if the need arose" that were leaked after the main occupations were broken up. The NYPD for example set up an elaborate surveillance center and identified "leaders" in the movement for such a scenario. Other police units around the country did the same or similar.

Chevalier 11y ago

>And yet the extremely wealthy do face an abiding risk from festering inequity: The have-nots might finally lose patience and turn upon the haves. “That’s the real danger,” Mr. Cohan said. “This little thing called the French Revolution.” Yeah... I keep hearing this threat from people who really ought to know better. Inequality is a major talking point from the left, but it reflects complete ignorance of how the world works. The French Revolution is memorable precisely because it's so incredibly unusual. Look at Mexico, India, China... almost anywhere in the world aside from Europe and North America. There is virtually no society on the planet that doesn't concentrate wealth and power among the elite one percent, gated off from the lower classes. I'm not even speaking historically -- show me a modern country on any other continent that even remotely approaches a middle class. Also, re-distributing wealth doesn't necessarily solve the cultural problems that create inequality. Egypt massively subsidized food... and Egyptians promptly had massive numbers of children that overwhelmed even the ridiculously cheap food prices. Just this week, Afghanis threw acid in the faces of schoolgirls trying to get an education. The Saudis cling to power through massive welfare programs to pacify their increasingly fundamentalist populace. Even here in the US, cultures that discourage education and responsibility aren't suddenly going to churn out engineers and doctors if billionaires give away their wealth. The US will just continue down the well-trodden path that the rest of the world has already blazed, where tiny pockets of wealthy elites try to shelter themselves from the increasingly lawless masses. A revolution requires organization and discipline, which is absurd to expect even before you consider the unbeatable modern surveillance of all communications and movements in developed countries. The only threat that masses pose is lawless violence, much like what we saw in the Arab Spring -- but that's not really a problem when you can concentrate the rabble outside of elite pockets. Particularly when the rabble lack a unifying religious fervor, like what you see in the coalescing identity of fundamentalist Islam across MENA and Europe. So please stop making vague threats about the French Revolution, people. The Second Amendment is not going to help rednecks water the tree of liberty. The people are not going to surge against their capitalist oppressors as a tide of justice or whatever. At worst, less developed countries will turn into Libya... but the more likely result is India, where elites gate off the masses and let them cultivate self-destructive cultures.

angrybits 11y ago

wavefunction 11y ago

It seems in some ways that the solutions proposed by these anxious wealthy are limited or perhaps too simplistic. While I applaud their indulgence in supporting a $15 minimum wage, that doesn't mean much if commodity prices grow to erase those gains. It also puts further pressure on the remaining members of the "middle class" as they are the primary consumers of minimum-wage based services and will also be the ones to support the higher wages as costs are passed along to consumers. For decades our relatively equitable societies (minus racial inequalities and other gradually ebbing social issues) have been dismantled by these folks in the upper echelons of wealth and their willing conspirators in the upper-middle class and middle class in order to arrive at the situation we find ourselves in today. They have promoted favorable propaganda through their media organs that has poisoned the minds of the laboring classes towards collaboration, towards entrepreneurialism, and self-agency. They have defunded and neutered social institutions that worked contrary to their goals, even if innocuously like the attempts to destroy quality public education and labor protections. They have introduced a culture of consumption in place of production and individual industry to better capture a greater share of the productive gains furnished by technological and social advances. They have turned whole sectors of life into cut-throat for-profit industries such as health care and education. And the worst part is that they have been incredibly effective in convincing the average person that they have a better deal with a 1 in a million chance of striking it rich through individual luck than a more pragmatic chance at general comfort through social collaboration with their fellow humans. Their propaganda has succeeded wildly in programming many people to distrust government or cooperation in favor of a nihilistic anti-humanist lifestyle of consumer consumption simply because it is more conducive to social control and easing their ability to maintain their positions in society. How then do they propose to put this genie back in the bottle, having now let it loose these past several decades?

hackuser 11y ago
> the worst part is that they have been incredibly effective in convincing the average person Agreed. Remember 'Trickle Down Economics', over 30 years ago? If I understand correctly, the idea was to cut taxes for the wealthy, and their resulting increased investment would cause the economic benefits to 'trickle down' to everyone else. The surprising results are that when you cut taxes for high earners ... they become wealthier. Wages for everyone else have been flat since then.

hackuser 11y ago

Two concerns with how the socially concious wealthy might respond: 1) There's a flavor of the paranoid stories that seem prominent in that community (where do they hear this?) and popular on the right wing in general. Remember when Tom Perkins wrote a letter to the editor of the Wall St Journal saying that the wealthy are facing a "Kristallnacht"? [1] The French Revolution comparison and others like it reflects a similar mass paranoia, which is dangerous. 2) It's essential to maintain democracy, i.e., that each citizen has an equal vote. As taxes and public funding have been driven down, recipients have turned more and more to the wealthy donors, with gives the donors the only vote. And as the wealthy few provide more of the funding, they have more arguments to drive taxes down further -- look at what we're doing with our wealth! The problem is, we live in a democracy; we decide by vote how we want our society to change and progress. For a simple example, a new park in NYC is being funded by a wealthy donor; is the land use, design etc. decided democratically by the citizens or by the donor? I read that state universities in CA are forming partnerships with corporations in lieu of lost state funding; can they risk offending those corporations? Finally, the Koch brothers funded some economics institute at a U. in Florida (FL State?) and greatly influence the research, including the selection of faculty (IIRC; my memory of the story is imprecise, but you get the idea). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht